he was old enough to go to work he was sent to the paint shops of the Vandalia Railroad. There he remained for some time, but when he became a young man he aspired to be a fireman, or stoker, as we should say, and he made his first trip on an engine running between Terre Haute and Vandalia. Judging by his appearance, Mr. Debs is a man of great nervous tension, wiry, tall and sparsely built, in every respect a great contrast to Mr. Samuel Gompers, the President of the American Federation, who is a burly Englishman both in birth and appearance. From childhood, Debs seems to have been thoughtful and to have early had his attention directed to the needs of his class. He had but attained his majority when the great railroad strike took place at Pittsburg, which left so dark and bloody a stain upon the annals of the United States. At that time he had already made some mark in his own locality as a bright, brainy, rising young man. When he was twenty-four he was elected City Clerk of Terre Haute by the Democrats, to which party he belonged. Five years later he was elected member of the state legislature of Indiana by the Democrats. All the while he never ceased to be a railway stoker.

HIS EARLY CAREER.

From his youth up he was a strong trades unionist, and no sooner had he become a stoker than he joined the local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. There he distinguished himself by his quiet, earnest, and undemonstrative method of getting through business. He was soon selected as delegate to the conventions of the brotherhood. There also he made his mark, and he was ultimately appointed to the editorship of the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine. impossible for any one who pays even a cursory attention to the condition of the labour problem in America not to see that the great need of labour is organisation. He was not only editor of the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine, but for years he acted as treasurer and secretary, and in that capacity he won the golden opinions of all with whom he had to do. On one occasion the Grand Lodge

It is

voted him the sum of £400, in order to defray the cost of a trip to Europe. Debs maintained, however, that he had done no more than his duty, and refused to take the money. The lodge was equally obdurate, and it is said that the money lies at a bank to the present day, the lodge refusing to take it back and Debs to accept it. His salary as secretary and treasurer was £180 a year. The membership of his order was 27,000 strong, and during the whole of his term of office no complaint of any kind was made as to the accuracy of his accounts and the strict punctuality with which his payments were made. In recognition for his services it was proposed to raise his salary from £180 to £300, but this he declined. His magazine was popular among the firemen, and he made sufficient by it to enable him to give away in charity to the distressed members of the union the whole of his salary as secretary and treasurer.

HIS ASPIRATIONS.

Debs had for years been impressed with a sense of the hopelessness of any effective organisation among the railway employés, unless it were established on a basis wide enough to include all railway servants. In America each class of railway men has its own union. The locomotive firemen have nothing to do with the locomotive enginemen, and the switchmen are quite independent of the firemen and the engineers, so that it comes to pass that labour in connection with the railroads is paralysed by division, while the railroads, however keenly they may compete against each other, are united as one man against the claims of labour. To secure the union of all the branches of railway workmen became the great purpose of Mr. Debs's life. Here let me state that Mr. Debs is one of the few men in America against whom no one has ever raised the suspicion of mercenary motives. He is ambitious, they say no doubt that is true, ambitious for his class, and for the union which he thinks will pave the way for its emancipation. He never, however, cared for money, and this indifference to the almighty dollar, standing as it does in striking contrast to the crookedness and avarice of many of the labour leaders, places him upon a pinnacle apart, and does much to explain the enthusiasm and unity with which he has been supported in the great strike.

HIS GREAT SCHEME.

Frequent attempts were made to federate these bodies so as to have a supreme council, but the federated unions were so jealous of their council that the efforts came to nothing. Mr. Debs, after much studying of the causes of this failure, came to the conclusion that a closer union of the rank and file was necessary and that the power of the officers must be curtailed. He wanted an organisation which would reconcile the two apparently contradictory principles of strict trades-unionism and general organisation of all the men. He conceived the plan of organisation to consist of lodges, which were composed exclusively of the several branches of the railroad service, but were united as lodges of one general body, the idea being that to each branch of the service should be left the adjustment of such matters as affected that branch peculiarly and exclusively and could be handled by it without outside assistance, the general body being called upon to take charge of all matters of common interest to all railroad men, and to back up any individual branch if it proved to be too weak by itself to enforce such demands as the organisation at large might consider proper and just. In a general way the idea is similar to that which underlies the American Federation

of Labour. It combines the trade union principle with that of the Knights of Labour, which is expressed in the words "an injury to one is the concern of all."

THE AMERICAN RAILWAY UNION.

Having conceived this idea, Mr. Debs set to work to realise it. He is an eloquent man and an energetic organiser, and he had his paper, the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine, with which to enforce his views. After pointing out to the railway employés that the result of his scheme would increase their strength, and at the same time reduce their contributions to the central fund, he succeeded in securing recruits by the thousand, and at the beginning of last year the American Railway Union, one of the largest labour unions in the country, of which he is president and founder, was accomplished. I quote in full in "Chicago To-day " his declaration of principles,

His

involved in a round dozen of disputes one after the other, in all of which, notwithstanding the intense depression of trade, he succeeded, if not in pulling off the victory, at least in securing sufficiently good terms so as to increase his prestige and establish his hold over the union. most notable victory was gained in May, when, after an eighteen days' strike on the Great Northern Railway, the dispute was ended by an arbitration, which recognised the justice of seventy-five per cent. of the claims of the union.

THE GREAT NORTHERN TIE-UP.

The Great Northern employés, some 5,000 in number, demanded a return to the wage scale which had prevailed up to August 1st of last year. This the railway company refused. The men went out on strike, and for eighteen days there were thousands of miles of the Great Northern

which is not only interesting in itself, but sets forth on the best authority the views of some of the ablest labour men in America on the present position of labour on the railways.

The success of the new order was surprising. The trust and confidence which had been established by his onesty and integrity in the Order of Locomotive Fireinen enabled him to carry many of the lodges entirely into the new union, and in less than twelve months the membership had risen from nothing to 130,000. I had a long talk with Mr. Rogers, the editor of the organ of the union in Chicago, and was much impressed with his honesty, enthusiasm, and unbounded confidence in Debs.

TO PREVENT STRIKES.

When Mr. Debs organised the American Railway Union, it was with the avowed object of preventing strikes. Accidents will occur, however, even in the best regulated families, and Mr. Debs's union found itself

Railway upon which not a wheel turned. The American Railway Union co-operated with the Knights of Labour in order to secure this tie-up. The Knights were even prepared to go further, and were threatening to call out all the men who handled freight for the Great Northern from the Pacific coast to St. Paul. Alarmed at the threatened extension, the business men of Minneapolis and St. Paul persuaded the disputants to consent to arbitration.

The arbitrators gave an award which was practically a victory for the men. Fresh from the victory which had been preceded by several, some say as many as twelve other successes, on a minor scale, Mr. Debs was confronted by the decision of the Pullman employés in favour of a strike. It is from this time that Mr. Debs's personality came prominently before the public. He immediately threw himself into the struggle with a vigour and bitterness somewhat astonishing to those who had only known him as a quiet, silent, resolute organiser of victory.

MR. DEBS AND MR. PULLMAN.

It is difficult for Englishmen to understand exactly the degree of antipathy generated by Mr. Pullman's method of doing business. From the English standpoint Mr. Pullman was in many respects almost an ideal employer, but from the American point of view his attempt to form a model town, retaining in his own hand all the ground upon which it stands, is somewhat abhorrent. Over and over again in the course of the strike we have Mr. Pullman held up to public detestation, not so much because he reduced wages, as because of his refusal to allow his workmen-tenants to become purchasers of the land upon which their houses were built. In the very first speech which Mr. Debs delivered after the Pullman strike he sounded a keynote which has subsequently been taken up all round :

:

I am with you heart and soul in this fight. As a general thing I am against a strike, but when the only alternative to a strike is the sacrifice of manhood, then I prefer to strike. There are times when it becomes necessary for a man to assert his manhood. I am free to confess that I do not like the paternalism of Pullman. He is everlastingly saying: "What can we do for our poor working-men?" The interrogation is an insult to the men. The question is not, What can Mr. Pullman do for us? it is, What can we do for ourselves?

be considered-it is too easy to be generous with other people's money.

Do you know what this man does with his conductors and porters? Do you know that they are forced to live upon the charity of the travelling public? Mr. Debs continued: Charging exorbitant prices for his accommodations, lost to all sense of shame, he not only expects but depends upon the generosity of the people, who pay him the revenue upon which he waxes fat, to give his employés enough to live on. Only last month I went in a Pullman car over part of the western country. The conductor told me he was paid $30 a month, and had from this to board himself and support his family. The porter had $10 a month. Both were away from home two weeks at a time. That conductor asked me for money to buy him something to eat. This is the work of a great philanthropist.

Under this system of paternalism in vogue it is only a question of time until they own your bodies and have your souls mortgaged. It is a question that can be demonstrated to a mathematical nicety. In ten years more of this system he will own your bodies and have your souls mortgaged. Pullman's pretended philanthropy makes this a question of emancipation. His specious interest in the welfare of the "poor working-man" is in no way different from that of the slaveowner of fifty years ago. Remember that no power that can be devised will be neglected to divide you. But if you will follow Mr. Howard's advice there is no power on earth to make this strike a failure. Division means defeat and disaster.

Remember that the American Railway Union would rather be defeated honourably than triumph in disgrace. We believe in evolutionary revolution. We prefer agitation to stagnation. The same process that makes a Pullman, makes a thousand paupers. And the remedy is all in your own hands. We must change the condition of affairs-not by force, but by the right and intelligent votes of the toiling thousands.

A PROTEST AGAINST PATERNALISM.

Two days later he spoke even more strongly :

When the officials of the Pullman Company believe they are going to reduce you to subjection in a week or ten days they are making the mistake of their lives. This strike is going to be won, if it takes months, and it will be won because we are right.

Mr. Debs probably held, like many other Americans, the establishment of whatever appeared like a patriarchal or feudal system in detestation. Mr. Pullman was denounced as a Tzar, and the town which he had built was described as the satrapy of Sir George Pullman, who was an absentee satrap for the most part, for the workmen very seldom had an opportunity of seeing him face to face. He was not only their employer, he was also their landlord and the proprietor of the great store from which most of the inhabitants of Pullman had to buy their provisions. That was the head and front of his offending, and its contemplation seems to have excited Mr. Debs beyond all control. Still for a season all went well.

I believe a rich plunderer, like Pullman, is a greater felon than a poor thief, and it has become no small part of the duty of this organisation to strip the mask of hypocrisy from this pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor of labour. One of the general officers of the company said to-day that you could not hold out against the Pullman Company more than ten days longer. If it is a fact that after working for George M. Pullman for years you appear two weeks after your work stops, ragged and hungry, it only emphasises the charge I make before this community, and Pullman stands before you a self-confessed robber. A rich man can afford to be honest; a poor man is compelled to be.

THE REFUSAL TO ARBITRATE.

After the strike had lasted some weeks, however, it was decided to carry the war into the enemy's camp by organising a strike against all railroads which hauled Pullman cars. This step was decided upon at a convention at which representing 120,000

I do not believe in violent methods, but I do believe in telling the truth. The paternalism of Pullman is the same as the interest of a slaveholder in his human chattels. You are striking to avert inevitable slavery and degradation. Here is your father-in-law anxious about all his children. "You only owe me $70,000 for rent now, and I am not pressing you for payment!" Was there ever a greater public sham? All the time worried about your welfare and piling up millions in one of the great monopolies of the age, by putting his hands into your pockets. I differ from the gentleman who contends that Pullman's gift of $100,000 for a monument is a matter to

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delegates,

When the excitement was at its highest Mr. Debs made a speech which is characteristic of the man:

We have won every fight, and we have had eleven. Pullman is our twelfth, and we shall win that. There is no doubt about it. I am in favour of the American Railway Union expending its last dollar and its last man in a cause righteous. (Cheers.)

SO

We must first appoint a committee to wait on the Pullman officials. If they refuse to settle, if they will not arbitrate, we will not move a Pullman car one inch. And after every one is side-tracked, if the railroad companies want to go into partnership with Pullman in this fight we will inaugurate the greatest railway strike the world has ever seen. (Loud cheers.)

The crisis is approaching, and we must invite and not evade it. We have declared war on Pullman, and it is a fight to a finish The Knights of Labour and the American Railway Union are united in a holy strife, and when we begin our battle we will never rest. The result is certain, for it means the unification of labour. (Cheering.)

Pullman is the continental monster of the times. I have some respect for a man bold enough to boast of his enslavement of labour and frank enough to admit his oppression. But Pullman posed for twenty years as the friend of the labouring

man. He gave $100,000 to the Columbian Museum (a Pullman delegate exclaimed, "and cut us the next morning"), and took every penny of it out of the lives of his working men.

He must pay his people living wages. All we ask for is an honest living. Pullman for the past year has been robbing every man, woman and child in his employ.

He is a pirate on the high seas of labour, but the American Railway Union has a long arm, and it will reach in its might up to his black flag and wreck him altogether. It is our duty. (Wild cheering.)

We will brand him as infamous. What must be the logical outcome of his policy? His men will be made slaves, and his women driven to lives of shame. Do your duty. (Cries of "We will" and cheering.)

The American Railway Union is organised for business. We have had enough patent leather organisations parading through America, fattening and feasting on labour. I would rather see us all go down in an honest fight than to live on in uselessness. (Cry of "No dry rot.") If we go down now, we go down with the most honourable record a labour organisation has ever made. But we are not going down. (Cheers and shouts of "Never.")

We will confront monopoly in the strongest fortress, and we all know what the outcome must be. We will side-track Pullman and his cars together! We must not talk, but act, and no man who has not the courage to go to the bitterest end has a right to enlist.

You know what this man has been doing in the weeks since the strike. He has been sitting on his burrow, like a hyena, waiting for these people to lie down exhausted with starvation that he may fatten on their bones.

This is the greatest and most powerful monopoly of our time-the monumental octopus of all unscrupulous combinations.

And now I wait the bugle-call to duty.

III. THE RAILWAY WAR AND ITS SEQUEL.

In this mood the greatest railway strike of modern times was entered upon. Hardly had it begun, however, before Mr. Debs discovered that he had made a mistake. His first miscalculation was somewhat similar to that which misled Napoleon when he declared war against Prussia. Debs calculated that a certain proportion of the railway companies would discontinue to use the Pullman cars. So far from this being the case every railway made common cause against the strike. What was more, the companies which did not use Pullman cars on their lines fought side by side with the other companies in resisting what they considered to be an unwarrantable interference with the management of their business. But even more serious than this was Mr. Debs's second miscalculation. He forgot the immense number of unemployed railway men who were only too anxious to fill the vacant places. In the last twelve months no fewer than 60,000 of the employés of the railways leading into Chicago had been paid off. It was further calculated that there were at least 150,000 unemployed railway men in the country when the boycott was declared. Altogether Mr. Debs only commanded 120,000 men in his railway union, which is just about one-seventh of the men employed on the railroads last year. Under these circumstances defeat was a foregone conclusion. The only chance left was by intimidating the railroads either by stopping traffic or in terrorising the unemployed men who wished to fill the vacant places.

THE FIGHT AND ITS FAILURE.

It is not necessary here to deal with the details of the disastrous conflict which Mr. Debs had invoked. The railroads threatened by the boycott of the Pullman cars met the strike as a unit. They put their ablest fighting man in command, supplied him with unlimited funds

and went into the fight to win. What followed is only too familiar to the newspaper reader. Traffic was blockaded for several days on many of the most important lines leading into Chicago; but there was no lack of labour, and the moment any attempt was made to interfere with the trains an appeal was made to the authorities for protection. The State militia was called out, and deputy-marshals were sworn in as special constables. The strike was declared on June 26th, and for a week things went on from bad to worse. It was not until the second week that the struggle culminated in the outburst of incendiarism and violence which led the authorities to fire with ball cartridge upon the mob, and restore order by resorting to the time-honoured expedient of the Old World. All through the strike, Mr. Debs kept on issuing plaintive appeals for the maintenance of order and peace, but he might as well have spared himself the trouble.

THE ACTION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

The real interest of the struggle did not turn upon what Mr. Debs did or did not do, but the effect which the strike had upon the evolution of two great movementsone the strengthening of the central federal power as against that of the State, and secondly, the application of arbitration as a mode of settling industrial disputes. The first arose in this wise: When the mail trains were stopped, when the working of those lines which were in the hands of the official receivers were interfered with, and when the Inter-State Commerce Act was disregarded so that whole trainloads of bananas from the Gulf of Mexico lay rotting in the cars which should have taken them to Chicago, the question became one on which the Federal Government had a word to say. President Cleveland, upon whom the responsibility of taking action in the matter lay, was in a somewhat difficult position. Mr. Pullman was a strong Republican who was reported to have cut his men's wages because they had voted for Cleveland. Governor Altgeld was Democratic, so was Mr. Hopkins, the Mayor of Chicago. Upon Governor Altgeld and Mayor Hopkins primarily rested the responsibility for the maintenance of law and order in Illinois and in Chicago, and it was impossible for President Cleveland to interfere from Washington without more or less censuring the Democratic governor and the Democratic mayor. Mr. Debs also was a Democrat. These party considerations, however, weighed little compared with the necessity of laying the panic which had taken hold of the moneyed men of the east. Therefore President Cleveland determined to act.

A NEW DEPARTURE.

Hitherto no Federal soldier had ever been sent into the State of Illinois, excepting at the request of the Governor of the State. President Cleveland, however, considered that the situation was one which demanded immediate action. On July 3rd a regiment of Federal infantry was sent to Blue Fields to act against the strikers. The step was as bold as it was unprecedented. Governor Altgeld protested at once and vehemently against such interference with State rights. It is too much the fashion among the English people to ignore the arguments against such intervention. That is because, in this country, we have never really realised the extent of State Sovereignty which exists in America. According to American theory the State of Illinois is almost as independent in regard to all its internal affairs as the Republic of France. For certain specified objects the State of Illinois has entered into a federal alliance with other

republics lying north, south, east and west of it. The union, however, no more authorises the Federal Government to interfere with the internal affairs of the State than an agreement of the European concert to coerce the Turk at Dulcigno or Smyrna justifies the European concert in interfering in the suppression, let us say, of a rebellion in Ireland or the punishment of the Anarchists in Paris.

TOWARDS CENTRAL POWER.

What the strike made clear, however, was that the railways, which are inter-state properties executing under contract the delivery of the United States mails, have become to a certain extent a federal imperium in imperio. Notwithstanding all limitations of constitutional custom the Federal Government claims the right of effective sovereignty over the whole of the railroads of the United States. This may be necessary, it may be an indispensable next step in the evolution of the American nation, but no one can deny that it does constitute an innovation of a very startling character, and one which naturally provoked the liveliest resentment both on the part of the local authorities and the labour leaders. Governor Altgeld, as I have said, protested, and so did Mr. Debs.

GOVERNOR ALTGELD'S POSITION.

Governor Altgeld's position was this: that the State of Illinois was perfectly able to do everything that was needed to be done in keeping the lines open; the difficulty in transmitting the mails had not arisen from lawlessness or violence, but from the inability of the railway companies to find men to run their trains. After the strike he asserted more positively than before that the Federal troops had not been needed, they were simply an irritant, and accomplished nothing. The State troops co-operating with the city and county authorities handled things splendidly, and they would have done even better had the Federal troops kept away. To outsiders who see things from a distance it seems somewhat difficult to accept this complacent optimism. Nothing seems to be more obvious than that towards the end of the first week in July the mob got completely out of hand. They burned down the Exhibition buildings, made bonfires of cars, and for nearly two days kept the suburbs of Chicago in a reign of terror. When fifty thousand or sixty thousand armed men are roaming at will over the suburbs of a great city, the mayor of which publicly declares that he is unable to give the public protection, when bonfires are being made of freight-cars in all directions, and trains can only be run under military escort, it seems absurd to say that the local forces were adequate enough to maintain order. Still, it is no doubt true that if the local forces had been used with energy, the Federal troops might have been dispensed with. It was the fatal hesitancy to shoot when the necessity for shooting had arisen that caused all the trouble. That hesitancy existed quite as much on the part of the Federal authorities as on that of the State. The bullets which ultimately convinced the mob that they were not to be allowed to have their own way were fired quite as much by the militia as by the Federal soldiery.

MR. DEBS'S PROTEST.

Mr. Debs and the American Railway Union took a different line from Governor Altgeld. They argued the question, not from the point of view of State rights, but from the principles of labour. Mr. Debs told the President that, under the guise of protecting the mails and United States property, the army was being used to coerce and intimidate peaceable people into a humiliating obedience to their oppressors:—